Want to hire more junior developers without the headaches?
Meet our Pathway Coach Maria Georgieva, whose job it is to help junior developers integrate seamlessly into your tech team
There are plenty of reasons for wanting to invest more in junior developers. Here are just a few of the many reasons we’ve heard recently:
- “We need more juniors to balance out our mids and seniors…”
- “We want to stop relying on external suppliers and build our own tech team in-house…”
- “We need to evolve our tech team and build out our Software Development function, but there’s a shortage of devs…”
The list goes on. But we know that bringing on junior developers isn’t always easy — graduate schemes can be time-consuming or not fit for purpose. There can also be the extra workload of on-boarding the junior or helping them to settle in.
So at Makers, we developed the Pathway program. This helps newly joined Junior Developer contractors during their first year. Afterwards, your company can hire a full-time employee — having had an entire year of relevant experience with them. (For an example of the Pathway in practice, check out this story about Kate Morris, who works at Deloitte.)
A key part of making the Pathway program work is having a specific person helping the developer integrate with your company. This is where Makers Pathway Coach Maria Georgieva comes in.
She’s passionate about helping people — in this case junior developers — thrive at work.
“We spend way too much of our most valuable resource (time) at work to be doing something we don’t like,” she says. “Finding work that is meaningful for you, colleagues that share your values and drawing inspiration from the results of your efforts — that’s what it’s all about.”
Since the lockdown started, she’s noticed two themes emerge. One is that working fully remotely is indeed much more doable than expected. The second is noticing our ability to adapt and adjust.
“This is exactly what we are witnessing today. We are seeing more and more flexible working hours, even locations,” she says.
When it comes to Maria’s work on the Pathway, there are five main categories that she helps junior developers with. She describes them below.
1) Induction and orientation
I help each developer integrate in the company even while they are technically a contractor. Whenever a Junior Dev joins a team this means a fair amount of additional support needed in order to induct them.
This is not just related to project specifics but also team interactions and company practices: learning how to navigate the company landscape from the beginning is crucial for their success in the new environment. We aim to relieve the teams from as much of that as possible.
2) Sharing great working practices
The first year as a dev is especially important when it comes to establishing great working habits: structuring the workflow, so that they are most effective and productive is also something we cover, paying close attention not only to the process but to communication and development areas as well.
In addition, working on establishing a reflective practice is key for enabling continuous improvement and development, which are a big part of what makes a great professional. We are going after small, actionable and continuous marginal improvements that over time have a big compound effect.
3) Mindset
Cultivating a growth mindset. This is something that starts with our Bootcamp and is continued with the Pathway support. It’s about always keeping an open mind and questioning the approaches that you are using too.
Looking for win-win situations. Besides project work, it’s important to be proactive about exploring additional fields where personal interests (strengths and development areas too) and business needs intersect. Usually internal initiatives are great platforms for that. Joining Green teams, starting an internal gaming network, creating a course on a topic you love as you enjoy teaching and the company has juniors to up-skill in it, representing the company on a conference doing demos of projects when you want to polish presentation and people skills are just a few examples that I’ve recently seen our Makers on the Pathway do.
Transferring skills. A lot of our Makers are career changers, so they already have a lot to bring to the table. Adapting those skills to suit the world of software development is another focus area.
4) Helping navigate the Learning and development (L&D) of the devs
I hold regular career development consultations, helping devs find what is next for them, what is the direction in which they want to grow. I also discuss ways to best utilise the L&D budget that the devs have from Makers, tailored to their own learning needs.
We work together in regular 1:1s on honing skills that they want to develop. Our team at Makers also organises great up-skilling events for Pathway Makers — for example we recently had an event where the guest speaker was a coach from Google. His mission is building educational artefacts to make computing and data science more accessible and inclusive.
5) Facilitating 1:1s with our Pathway Technical Coach
Sometimes one of the devs I look after will have to discuss something technical. For a specific concept or going more into the details of useful approaches, I connect them with our Pathway Technical Coach, who is a developer himself with a lot of practical knowledge to offer.
